skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a service that warns merchants of fraud-likely customers. Precharge. I was surprised to not see it anywhere on HN to date.

You can learn more at http://precharge.com/guaranteed_chargeback_protection/

Essentially you pay Precharge to qualify the customer and if it passes their fraud checks, they will reimburse or fight the chargeback.

They might be maintaining their own repository of problem customers here: http://www.chargebackfile.com/

Hope this is helpful to anyone considering mitigating chargeback risk.
"Technical skills" at all of the jobs that I have had entail much more than writing code. The key technical skills are mastery of the problem domain, not the programming language.
You'd be surprised. There are quite a few "programmers" who can't. I've met a few. Hell, I've even heard someone claim years experience and they couldn't write a simple loop.
It's typical in game development to disable both exceptions and RTTI entirely. dynamic_cast is out on either of those counts. std::almost_everything is out due to exceptions.

EA released a GPL'd "EASTL" library a few years ago for those and other reasons, you can read all about it here: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n227...
I was hoping to read about some of the real reasons Javascript sucks, like the contortions I have to go through to get exception-safe asynchronous flow control.

But this article is just trolling.
On at least one occasion you also mixed up then/than.

>so communicating with colleagues and friends that expect me to hold my conversation to a higher standard then elsewhere on the net is appreciated.
From the company that brought you Silverlight, JScript, VBScript, ActiveX....

Don't do this. Microsoft doesn't matter anymore.
He's probably one of the most influential judges in the country outside the Supreme Court Justice, and is more influential in legal academia than even most of the Justices. He doesn't have to sit on the Federal Circuit to influence policy. He has a pretty big soap box as a judge on the 7th Circuit and a professor at the University of Chicago.
1. As a designer I don't have a specific focus, I work on web apps as much as iOS apps. Haven't worked on an Android app yet, though.

2. I haven't had anybody pirate by book as fas as I know. Maybe it's because of the low price point? That being said I wouldn't really care even if it did happen. I do not believe it would take away from sales much, probably just expose my book to people who would never have bought it anyway.

So in a way, piracy is a form of market segmentation that enables you to reach even the cheapest customers!
Aha, thanks for clearing that up.
My biggest complaint about /. is through a combination of other sites it takes a half a day or more for stories I'm interested in to hit it, so by the time they are there I have already read them. The comments there add very little to the conversation imo.
He's on 7th Circuit, sitting in Chicago. The 6th Circuit doesn't cover any places worth noting. :-P
Can't speak for Braintree, but generally US-launched financial services take some time to expand internationally for two reasons: 1) tons of compliance and regulation unique to each country, and 2) having to interface with the specific payment technologies in that country.

PayPal is one of the best international payment options because it's had more time and money to throw at these problems than almost anyone else.
I'm hardly a fanboy, I'm just lucky that MS' web stack became usable at the time I changed to a job where I needed to start using it. I don't think I could have transitioned from where I was to ASP.NET or the older stacks. I actually miss Apache/mod_perl which I found much simpler and more powerful, and I regret that I didn't get the chance to use Mojolicious professionally. But MVC3/4 haven't been so bad. I like the naming-convention-based approach because Rails and other frameworks use it, and I like having the ability to override it as-needed with attributes or route definitions. I like the dynamic type, given that I'm a die-hard Perl programmer, but I honestly haven't needed to use it in MVC so I'm not sure what you're referring too... maybe just the ViewBag object? I always used typed models for my views, and when I pass info through ViewBag I pull typed objects out of it at the top of my view so I have strongly typed variables in the rest of the view.

I don't think Microsoft tech has ever favored clarity...it's usually too java-esqe ivory-tower architeched enterprisey for my tastes. MVC is like that too, but the worst bits seem to be the ones inherited from ASP.NET. The new stuff is somewhat better, and you can now at least go look at the code to figure out how it works.
Isn't that why the constitution provides for <Nine> justices, though?

The number of justices on SCOTUS isn't set by the Constitution, it's set by Congress. Throughout history there have been as many as 10 and as few as 5 justices.

Is it not odd(?) that USA appoints people with no ideas ever expressed, over peoplel like Posner who actually have something important to say?

Welcome to U.S. politics.
A completely unsurprising blog post from a .NET guy about how static-typing is all that's needed to save front-end web development.

Sadly, almost every problem he's listed as a frustration when working with javascript is almost exclusive to .NET because of how bad the web tooling is. None of those are problems in Rails or even Node. Why, in this day and age is .NET still such an isolated and insulated community?

Edit Ok I really can't help myself so here it is point by point:

> I don't like any scripting or dynamic languages. I like code that compiles for lots of obvious reasons.

I guess they are not obvious to me. I would really prefer it if you could actually state your arguments as I'm not generally persuaded by a lot of hand waving.

> Ever try to use different JavaScript tools with conflicting jQuery versions? Yeah, that sucks.

What? No, I can't actually say this has ever been a problem. Nor should it be.

> How about trying to figure out how to make 20 javascript include files load quicker as one request? Yeah that sucks too.

This is pretty easily solved in just about every modern development stack outside of .NET. Perhaps it's just Visual Studio that sucks? To be honest even in .NET this isn't hard to do, but .NET developers do seem allergic to anything that involves the command line.

> Performance? Let me just point to the old Facebook mobile app made with JS & HTML5. It sucked. Enough said

Is this enough though? It just sounds like an anecdote to me. A single data point. Linked in's app is great as another example. Even so, no should expect that HTML5/JS was for everything or the ultimate in front-end performance. Typescript will do absolutely nothing to improve this. It isn't simply a language problem it is the curse of code hosted in a browser intended to be completely cross-platform compatible.

> How about unit testing JavaScript? I've never tried it...

Then I can't really see why you would be an expert on how javascript sucks in this regard (or any really). Have you tried unit testing the front-end of a WPF or Silverlight app? I can tell you from direct experience it truly sucks.

This is entirely a tooling and experience based problem. I've done web development in .NET too, for years. It sucked, so I stopped doing it that way and moved to Rails finally. Despite this, I still didn't have the same level of issues that the author experienced. It is possible to do front-end web development in .NET with a minimum of pain it just isn't the norm, and arguably it still isn't very convenient. Especially with a community that largely waits around for Microsoft to anoint and every technology and bless it with Visual Studio integration before using it.

I hate javascript too. I just think I have better reasons and personally find Coffeescript more than sufficient to ease my pain.
"Ever try to use different JavaScript tools with conflicting jQuery versions? Yeah, that sucks."

Not really. You might be relying too much on 3rd party libraries. You gotta get you're hands dirty a little more, but this might be due to your disinterest in non-compiling languages.

It's now three people I read that work for the enterprise and don't like JS. Interesting.
I think JavaScript is a tool, right for some jobs. If you want to secure your game code, write a native binary for the platform of your choosing. You'll get better performance too. If you want to write a website that is accessible on all browsers and all platforms then JavaScript serves its purpose very well.
He'd be a great, inspired pick for anyone but the real reason he won't be appointed is his age. Politically the dominant strategy is to appoint justices that can be expected to hold the seat for at least two decades.
Sirix - a versioned, treebased storage system in Java (free software)
Think of it as a persistent DOM with versioning capabilities especially well suited for flash disks. Furthermore moving subtrees is allowed as well as copying nodes/subtrees from other resources. All XPath-axis and more are provided. Very soon, in a couple of days maybe we will provide temporal axis. Furthermore hashes for each node are efficiently generated (based on it's subtree) and persisted as well as the number of children and descendants of a node is. A diff-algorithm facilitates the import of differences between tree structures. A GUI which is currently revised supports a Visual Analytics approach for comparing tree-structures. A rudimentary XPath 2.0 engine currently will be replaced with a brackit.org binding to support XQuery 1.0 and the Update Facility. Work on incremental indexes also started. Saxon might be used (XSLT, XQuery 1.0, XPath 2.0) as well.<p>Sirix will be nothing without a community, thus try it :-) Furthermore I more than welcome further open source developers which are also eager to bring Sirix one step forward. As described, there's a bunch of work todo and I have even more ideas sticking in my head ;-)
Show HN: Server side javascript meta templates
> What's your replacement?

He's all too likely to actually answer that question with his own bizarro language.

Everybody and his dog seems to have a javascript replacement these days, many of which seem to just sort of rearrange the suck a bit to suit the author's tastes.

I don't personally think javascript is particularly bad, indeed it seems a mostly pretty decent language for its niche, with a few annoying quirks—but every language has annoying quirks.
...like the contortions I have to go through to get exception-safe asynchronous flow control.

OK, I'm game. Care to elaborate?
No idea. Java applets or Silverlight used only as code libraries could be the answer but have their own issues. Flash isn't really an answer as programming in ActionScript isn't any better. Java applets have always had issues due to JVM version problems. I have had dozens of issues in the past with trying to manage a firewall or load balancer and it only works with a special Java version. That sucked too.

Whatever it is, it would have to be sandboxed in the browser so it doesn't cause security issues. Silverlight used as a class library only meets all the criteria to be the solution. But I think something entirely new may have to be created.
Know any port knocking as a service companies? If there was a reliable way to get a udp connection between hosts that I didn't have to write myself, I'd be tempted to take this on.
Here is a cool fb hack to find out who has your cell number in their phone.

Create a new account using fake info and a throwaway email. Put your actual cell number in the profile. Facebook will then recommend friends to connect with. Those people have your phone number in their address book.
I'm guilty of sometimes using big-O notation when discussing amortized average costs as well.

It seems nonsensical to discuss worst-case behavior of hash-based data structures since we can (and should) make it arbitrarily unlikely.

In other words, if O(n) is the limit as n goes to infinity then the probability of actually encountering worst-case beahvior on a hashtable operation is 0 (assuming a non-broken hash function). Near-worst case behavior becomes similarly improbable.

This is different than many algorithms like, say, classic quicksort which have worst-case behavior on values that naturally appear in practice.
We recently started using Solr in a similar manner where I work. We don't go as far as to pack an index in with our code, but each page serving instance has an embedded Solr server that it uses to pull a lot of fairly static data. Those indexes are updated nightly from a master Solr server which imports its data from a normal relational database.

So far it has worked really well, but I don't think it really offers many advantages scalability wise over other NoSQL solutions. Like most other solutions it trades fast writes/consistent reads for fast reads, which is fine in many cases. Around the time we were adding Solr though, I heard about Datomic (http://www.datomic.com/). I haven't had time to really investigate it, but it seems to me that Datomic provides fast reads in a manner very similar to the Solr configuration you described. Live versions of the database's index are deployed to agents that live on your app servers, but unlike the Solr configuration these agents receive updates to the index in real time. At a glance at least, it seems to offer all of the advantages of the Solr solution while still allowing relatively fast updates to the data.

This is an interesting talk on the topic by Rich Hickey (who created Datomic): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cym4TZwTCNU. It's long but I thought it was worthwhile.
Here's my biggest client:
Chrome: 35%
Safari: 31%
Firefox: 16%
Internet Explorer: 9%

This client has mostly "under 30" age visitors and, when I visit their business, their customers have a lot of Mac notebooks around. In fact, I once remarked that I don't think I've ever seen a customer use a non-Mac computer in any of their locations.

I was told recently by both my under-25 year old sons that none of their friends use IE and, of course, neither do they. I strongly believe this is the trend to follow. Young people don't use IE.
> I've been writing large-scale JS applications with SproutCore since 2007, and not once have I been bitten by a bug that would have been caught by static typing.

Common things such as access an undefined variable or property or trying to call a method of a null object would be detected by most static type checking algorithms.
The watery Big Bang and the 32-step power steering fluid check
Tooting my own horn again, but you just asked for https://pagekite.net/:

$ pagekite.py /path/to/file.blah yourname.pagekite.me

... send people a link to https://yourname.pagekite.me/file.blah and it streams from your disk. CTRL+C and it's offline with no copies stored anywhere in the cloud. Works with entire folders too (append +indexes to generate indexes), which is good for static HTML demos. If you want a harder-to-guess URL, append the +hide flag to the command above.

And yes, it's open source and you can run your own relay/reverse-proxy if you don't want to rely on me. Give it a try! :-)
I pine for the days before "app" was used for everything
the replacement is clear: lua
http://blog.luapineapple.com/?p=152

one of the most interesting and impressive lans out there:
http://luajit.org/

things exist such as: luakit
http://mason-larobina.github.com/luakit/
I thought it was a great article.
Let's hope it doesn't suffer a DMCA auto-takedown.
You know what else will drive up the costs? Running bad trial after bad trial after bad trial, burying the results, and only publishing if and when you finally come up with something positive.

Not only does this provide a dangerously (murderously?) distorted view of the compound in question, it means patients (read: victims) will be paying exponentially more for their "treatments".

It's an increasingly sordid business, and not one that can be defended in good conscience. As the Economist notes in its current review of "Bad Pharma" "This is a book that deserves to be widely read, because anyone who does read it cannot help feeling both uncomfortable and angry."

http://www.economist.com/node/21563689
OP probably means the chaining of several async calls. Atleast in Node, the convention is to bubble up an err object back if any of the functions throw up. If you let an exception to throw, then the Node process crashes. There is a global catch-all error event listener, but it's use is generally discouraged.
The standard requires amortized O(1) insert and lookup operations, so it's in practice going to be a hashtable.
+ Have a 4 year vesting schedule with a 1 year cliff, so if they don't work out they're not a shareholder anymore.

+ Offer them multiple options of equity/salary and let them pick what works best for their situation. Once you've agreed verbally write it up in an email as a non-binding offer letter, then have your lawyer make it legal.

+ Don't let them push you around. Lawyers are bred to be intimidating - keep that in mind. Don't get dazzled with bullshit. Do research and follow Silicon Valley best practices (like vesting). You'll regret it forever if they convince you to agree to something stupid.

+ Absolutely do not let them handle the equity/financing/control documents for the company. Get an external firm to do it for you, despite the cost. Having someone with a conflict of interest handle your legal documents is Officially Stupid.

+ Do a trial period first. Pay them $N to work for a couple weeks or a month. Don't even talk about it being for a long term gig. Just make it about the project and make it as well defined as possible. It'll be much easier to simply not continue after that then to fire them once they're officially hired.
I actually have a phobia of lotus plants. It was bad enough that I couldn't look at that picture without almost passing out. (It would have been nice if you'd put a warning in the title).

I can't really explain why it has such an affect on me, but it's pretty nice to know I'm not alone.
Yes, I think he's got a problem there, because his best chance is the Democrats picking him, but his best fit is with the Republicans, for whom he isn't orthodox enough. If a Democratic president picked him, he'd probably be confirmed: he has enough "non-left" background for bipartisan credibility (a Chicago-school law-and-economics background), but has enough left-leaning positions that at least some Dems shouldn't find him impossible to support. But, he's 72, which limits his appeal as a bipartisan choice. And as a straight Republican nominee has has problems on things like abortion. So I would guess he's not destined for the Supreme Court.
US Navy helps develop scary PlaceRaider smartphone malware
Oh my, I've been saying cottaging all this time! But in my defence, I'm Canadian, see #7 here:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cottaging&...

British/Canadian term for going to the cottage, chalet or
camp located in a rural or semi-rural area.

Thanks for pointing it out. Definitely saved me some embarrassment down the road, like the time I asked the cashier at the grocery store to "bag" me.
> Ever try to use different JavaScript tools with conflicting jQuery versions? Yeah, that sucks.

So library conflicts are unique to JavaScript? also I never had compatibility issues with jQuery because it does a good job at staying backward compatible.

> How about trying to figure out how to make 20 javascript include files load quicker as one request? Yeah that sucks too.

I can do it with one shell script, if you have a problem figuring that out, the issue is not with JavaScript...

> Performance? Let me just point to the old Facebook mobile app made with JS & HTML5. It sucked. Enough said.

So Facebook's mobile app is representative of ever web app ever created? This statement is ridiculous in so many ways.

> How about unit testing JavaScript? I've never tried it, but it sure sounds like fun.

If you can't explain why it's a bad experience, you shouldn't bother stating it, otherwise it's just BS.

> My biggest problem with JavaScript is code security. If I make some awesome product, there is no way to protect my code. How can we expect game makers to write apps in 100% JavaScript and HTML5 if they can't protect their intellectual property?

There are 99999 minifiers and obfuscators out there and don't act like you never heard of disassemblers.

> There are compiling tools like Closure, unit test frameworks, minify, coffee script, TypeScript and a bunch of other tools. But to me, they all try to make up for the weaknesses and problems with JavaScript. JavaScript is a mess and we spend a lot of time trying to work around all of it's problems.

It's like saying that Visual Studio and all tools used with .NET make up for the weaknesses of C#.

> It is possible to program in Silverlight, Java or Flash and run that in the browser instead of JavaScript, but they all have their own problems and lack universal mobile support. I believe Microsoft's new TypeScript is a step forward for JavaScript, but I think we need to start planning to go a whole different direction. We need a new universal client side programming model, because JavaScript sucks.

The title should be changed: One .NET guy doesn't like programming in JavaScript.
Yes, that's it! Thank you! I apparently misremembered the purpose, but at least I got the sorted tree part right. :)
thank you very much for that. ME.js has keyboard controls, and this doesn't use jQuery. Considering this is less than a third of the size of mediaelement, once it gets keyboard controls, this seems like a clear champion.
Making Positive and Negative Memories
memories
Seattle - JavaScript Engineer at Simply Measured (full-time)

http://simplymeasured.com/about/careers/

We’re looking for a hungry and brilliant senior engineer with deep expertise in Javascript to join the Simply Measured engineering team. You’ll work with the technical leadership to solve hard problems and build the foundations of the product offerings our customers love. We love data, we love analytics, and we love making our customer’s lives easier.

What you’ll need to be hired for the job:

- Mastery of Javascript

- Experience with SVG and/or Canvas

- Experience in data visualization

What you’ll need to grow into being great at your job:

- Mastery of Ruby

- Deep understanding of functional programming techniques(map, reduce, select, etc)

- Experience with Excel and preferably Ecma-376
I dunno, I think sum_{i=0}^{\infty} (-1)^i 4/(2i+1) is a pretty good compression for an infinite string.
Petri Net Programming « Azimuth
Browser Based Quilt Design Tool
Ah, good clarification on the mechanics.
Yes, most definitely this. For instance small niche site I run mostly dealing with females 30-60 years of age, Chrome has 17%, Safari 18%, Firefox 22% and IE 36%.
This is exactly the sort of article I want to see on HN. It's thorough, and instead of dropping a pile of dotfiles on github and saying "here you go", Steve goes through everything and explains what's what and why.
Microsoft was so ruthless, and dominating in the 1990's that it will be incredibly difficult to convince any developer that was streamrolled by this company to give them a second chance.
You need a real project to learn how to program. Anything else does not give the motivation to break through the problems and learn what is needed to get stuff built.
Instagram beats Twitter
What about the energy costs?
UI/UX is not subjective. Design may be objectively measured by its ability to satisfy users' actionable needs. Design is a solution to a problem. The author is conflating form with function. Form follows function.
Suspense Peak }1{
Epic
Unless he's changed his ways, I thought xkcd was still drawn by pencil and paper, then outlined with pen, scanned in, then touched up via a paint program?
But how do libraries help you from that?